Question

A company operates an on-premises Windows file server cluster hosting 40 TB of departmental file shares accessed via SMB. Users depend on NTFS ACLs, Active Directory integration, and DFS namespaces. The company wants to migrate these shares to AWS with minimal application changes, preserve file permissions, and provide a fully managed SMB file service in the cloud. The migration must occur incrementally over several weekends with ongoing incremental syncs until final cutover. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Provision Amazon FSx for Windows File Server joined to AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and use AWS DataSync to perform scheduled incremental transfers of the SMB shares, preserving NTFS ACLs and metadata until final cutover.

Answer

Migrate the file data to Amazon S3 using AWS DataSync, then have clients access it through the S3 API after refactoring the applications to use object storage.

Answer

Use AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) to rehost the entire Windows file server cluster as EC2 instances, keeping the existing file services running on the migrated servers.

Answer

Provision Amazon EFS and use AWS DataSync to copy the file shares into EFS, mounting the file system on client machines via NFS after cutover.